If a lesbian looks like a man and has facial hair, is it likely there’s some male hormone component affecting her sexual orientation? I know gay women occupy a huge range of sexual persona’s from ultra-feminine to very butch, and like everyone else are mostly just folks in between, but are there some gay women who attitudinally are essentially just men with clitorises?
I ask because this female member of an all girl band Le Tigre looks pretty much like a young man (she’s 29) and I thought the article about her affair with “Sia” a female Australian singer was a leg pulling exercise until I googled her up. SAMSON:
I suspect that there’s X% of women who need to shave their face at regular (perhaps not frequent, but still regular) intervals, gay or not. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out that there was a higher corelation between hairiness and lesbianess, but one woman who doesn’t shave and happens to also be gay is far far away from being an indicator of such.
Since gay women are such a small percentage of the population, and hairy women also a small percentage, finding sample groups large enough to say anything conclusive is hairy at best.
There’s more than one. I’ve run across several over the years, and I’m not in any way involved in the lesbian community.
BUT that doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily some factor that causes both lesbianism and facial hair.
I just always assumed that the correlation is simply that lesbians tend to be freer to reject commonly-held male notions of what constitutes female attractiveness.
Yeah that probably makes more sense. Her mustache is less impressive than those I’ve seen on some very hetero women. The “boy” face and and the mustache combo are what made me think about hormones.
Er…for the record, most women who rid themselves of facial hair aren’t (or shouldn’t be) shaving their faces. Waxing/threading works way, way better. I don’t think most self respecting women, lesbian or not, want a five o clock shadow type dealie.
Hirsutism is a symptom of several things and is mostly related to having an overbalance of androgens (male hormones).
There are plenty of women who have hirsutism, and plenty of women who are lesbians, but I highly doubt there’s any solid correlation between the two other than only women can have hirsutism and can be lesbians.
As Green Bean noted, it’s probably most likely that a woman who prefers to be a butch lesbian would also be a person who is not as inclined to combat the hair issues.
I suspect hirsutism is more common than you realise. It’s just considered so socially unacceptable and undesirable that most women who suffer from it diligently wax/pluck/other it away. I say this because I know far more women who have unwanted facial hair than I do lesbians. It also seems to become increasingly common with age, and after childbirth - one girl I know had laser hair removal to permanently rid herself of the “beard” she grew after becoming pregnant with her son. It certainly wasn’t a beard in any real sense, just some extra hairs growing in that general region of the face, but it made her feel embarrassed.
To expand a bit, it’s not just from Morocco to Bangladesh, but almost the whole of the Mediterranean region where women are inclined towards more rather than less bodily hair. And because of their complexions, it does indeed tend to be dark. No correlation whatsoever between hirsuitism and sexuality/gender identity IMHO.
Oh, yeah, and I’m an old, straight (white) sheila who needs to pluck and shave her little chin goatee in the shower every morning…nothing worse than some stray stubbles showing up by late afternoon in the tea-room.
My thoroughly straight niece has to shave. Plucking and waxing couldn’t keep up. And, yes, there’s some hormone problem there, but I don’t remember exactly what it is. She’s been excessively hairy since before puberty.
Polycystic ovaries?
I heard about a doctor from the UK who moved to the Mediterranean was diagnosing it left, right and centre, until someone pointed out that it was normal for women to be on the hairy side in that part of the world.
From what I have encountered with my “butch” lesbian friends, it isn’t that they are more prone to facial hair but they are less likely to do anything about it. If I didn’t wax my face regularly, I would have a light blonde mustache in no time.
I recall going to get my eyebrows waxed with a gay friend of mine. After they did her brows, the tech kept nagging her to PLEASE allow her to wax her upper lip waxed. To the point that my friend had to raise her voice! She did not want to. She was fine with her fuzz even if most of current society is not.
Yeah, I’d say, hormonal problems aside, that’s pretty much it. Except for a few lucky fair hairs, you really only notice excess hair on women who aren’t bleaching/plucking/waxing/shaving.
